For a few years I kept an old server going in the cellar. It kept the room it was in warm, and I bought some USB drives on sale from time to time and plugged them into the server and set the shares. I soon had about 2 terabytes of stuff on line and started to fill it with old movies and audio books. I’ve been collecting audio books for more than 10 years.
The old computer started to lock up and the dvd burner died so I needed a new way of storing my digital media.
I bought an “Iomega 1 TB Home Media Network Hard Drive Cloud Edition 34763 (Gray)” device that I plugged into my router and instantly got a terabyte of storage. It costs me $70 which is the price of 1TB of storage. I also plugged in my external drives and I now had about three terabytes of online storage. I turned off my old server.
I made the mistake of rearranging all of my data to take advantage of the new online disk, and I discovered that the Iomega box was so sluggish that it took 12 hours to copy a hundred gigs of files. If you buy one of these streaming video boxes be aware that they don’t make good file servers.
About this time I bought a Sony streaming media box for the TV (SMP-MX20 about $40). It had wireless built in and it said that I could use it with my home network. When I turned it on, it did not allow me access to my computer disk drives as I expected. It did however see the Iomega box.
For about a month I’ve been using the Sony box to access the Iomega box and generally it works well.
The main issue is that some of the videos do not play on this setup. Under the hood, the Iomega box is running linux and the “Townky Media Player”. The ability to translate the video stream (transcoding) is disabled. This will be a reoccurring theme in these boxes. They run Linux, but they disable things in an arbitrary manner. It seems that if the box were open, they would sell lots more of them. As it is, the software versions are frozen and many of the features that could make the devices very useful, are disabled.
The videos you get off the internet are often encoded with a method (codex) that cannot be played on the limited software provided with these boxes.
I liked the Iomega – Sony combination except for the limited ability to play some videos. I did not like the Iomega as a file server. It was turtle slow and very frustrating for backups. I decided to buy another network server just for backups.
I bought a NSA320 by Zyxel for about $70. I had some disk drives from the server that I turned off. The server PC had two 500 gig drives. When the box arrived I put in the drives and fired it up. THe NSA320 was running a Linux Distro, but gage more access to some of the features. As a file server it is much much faster than the Iomega box.
The Zyxel box also ran the Townky Server software, but it is also crippled and it is even worse in streaming video than the Ioemga box. Fully 2/3 of the videos I have aren’t even recognized by the Zyxel version of the Twonky Server software. Other disappointments are the PHP that comes with the server is crippled. I can’t run any of the software I’ve written. I wanted to load up WordPress and use the box for testing, but the box comes with a crippled older version of WordPress and won’t run the latest version. Why cripple PHP and WordPress? I can’t imagine. Why cripple Townky Server or MySQL? Beats the hell out of me. An open box would fly off the shelves. This box is just disappointing.
I turned off all the extra features of the NSA320 and I am just using it as a file server, which it does well.
I can “Root” both servers and load up real versions of Linux and get the latest and greatest features of all the programs including Twonky Server, PHP, MySQL, WordPress, and Apache. This is a fairly involved process. I can spend 3 or 4 hours doing this, and I may do this eventually, but for now, I’ll just stick with what I’ve got. I have a laptop that is semi-failing. The DVD died and the mouse pad went away. I can load this up with a version of Twonky Server for Windows and then make permanent maps to the file server files so that I can transcode streams to the Sony box and watch all the videos that the other boxes can’t handle.
What I learned was that Iomega and Zyxel release their products with a limited feature set and they cripple the ability to make any changes, so that users can’t easily break out of these limits. They work fairly well, most of the time. If you want a full featured server, you’ll have to create yourself out of an old PC.